uniformity, either in the number of settlers or in the area of their
settlement, to such a process as this, any more than to the army
organization which the process of distribution reflected. From the large
amount of public land which we find existing afterwards it has been
conjectured with some probability that the number of settlers was far too
small to occupy the whole of the country at their disposal, and this
unoccupied ground became "folk-land," the common property of the tribe as
at a later time of the nation. What ground was actually occupied may have
been assigned to each group and each family in the group by lot, and Eorl
and Ceorl gathered round them their læt and slave as in their homeland by
the Rhine or the Elbe. And with the English people passed to the shores
of Britain all that was to make Englishmen what they are. For distant and
dim as their life in that older England may have seemed to us, the whole
after-life of Englishmen was there. In its village-moots lay our
Parliament; in the gleeman of its village-feasts our Chaucer and our
Shakspere; in the pirate-bark stealing from creek to creek our Drakes and
our Nelsons. Even the national temper was fully formed. Civilization,
letters, science, religion itself, have done little to change the inner
mood of Englishmen. That love of venture and of toil, of the sea and the
fight, that trust in manhood and the might of man, that silent awe of the
mysteries of life and death which lay deep in English souls then as now,
passed with Englishmen to the land which Englishmen had won.


[Sidenote: The King]

But though English society passed thus in its completeness to the soil of
Britain, its primitive organization was affected in more ways than one by
the transfer. In the first place conquest begat the King. It seems
probable that the English had hitherto known nothing of kings in their